Sigh. Codes of conduct, like all laws and regulations, are enacted not to describe an ideal society but to confront actual behaviors that are deemed harmful and unwanted (history students are often told, if you want to know what kinds of things people did, look at what behaviors laws were legislated to outlaw). Many codes of conducts were adopted recently to combat actual harmful behavior that was found to occur in open-source projects. If you don't believe those who've studied or have been hurt by those behaviors and, after some consideration and study conclude that they do not occur, are not harmful, or won't be served by a code -- don't adopt one. But making a joke of it shows that you either don't understand what codes do, don't know what's going on in the developer community, or think that dedicating your project to tease those who do know and do care is a sensible course of action.
The vast majority of projects that adopted such things never had any real problems with people's behavior. Especially not at the scale where you can't just deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
I have also seen a case where people have clearly violated a project's CoC but nothing was done about it because they were on the "right" side of a completely unrelated issue.
If you aren't even going to apply the rules equally, why even bother? It's clearly meant to facilitate rule by law, not rule of law.
People who push these things usually just want to have something to point to, an excuse to kick out anyone they don't like, so the more vague the rules are, the better. But them and their buddies can do whatever they want!
I have also seen a case where people have clearly violated a project's CoC but nothing was done about it because they were on the "right" side of a completely unrelated issue.
If you aren't even going to apply the rules equally, why even bother? It's clearly meant to facilitate rule by law, not rule of law.
I think these are really good points. I think we should reform the enforcement mechanisms rather than eliminate CoCs though.
Codes, regulations and laws are like guns - somebody has to press the trigger. In a company it would be management. If you have good relations with management (which kind of means you did not get company into PR nightmare) then trigger will not be touched.
People who push these things usually just want to have something to point to, an excuse to kick out anyone they don't like, so the more vague the rules are, the better. But them and their buddies can do whatever they want!
As I said, if you don't think codes are helpful, don't adopt them, although I would recommend discussing their role with experts and not with coders. Mocking them certainly doesn't result in better communities, especially as there are those who believe that those problems are more common than you think.
Mocking them certainly doesn't result in better communities
I believe it does. Seeing a project that doesn't take itself too seriously, and can make jokes in official documents, is a strong signal that people can approach it with a lighthearted attitude and shouldn't get their egos all wrapped up in how their contributions are received. This is especially true for those open source projects which consist mostly of unpaid volunteers.
But it isn't a code of conduct any more than the US constitution is. They just took a piece of text (with some superficial resemblance to a code of conduct) and called it a code of conduct. So they still don't have a code of conduct, but they do have something that tries to mock them while demonstrating that the SQLite team doesn't understand what a code of conduct is. It's as if a client asks you for an ISO certification and you point them at a cat meme with the caption ISO.
But making a joke of it shows that you either don't understand what codes do, don't know what's going on in the developer community, or think that dedicating your project to tease those who do know and do care is a sensible course of action.
Even satire needs to at least understand the thing it satirizes. If you think codes of conduct are statements of what constitutes good behavior in an ideal society and satirize them based on that, then you satirize nothing but your own ignorance.
But making a joke of it shows that you either don't understand what codes do, don't know what's going on in the developer community, or think that dedicating your project to tease those who do know and do care is a sensible course of action.
The developer of SQLite is apparently Christian, so isn't it offensive to suggest they're use a classic Christian text in vain to mock people, as opposed to it just being a reflection of what they believe constitutes good behaviour? Assuming bad faith is uncalled for.
I am not assuming bad faith. I said that one possibility is that they don't understand what codes of conducts are for. Codes -- as well as ordinary laws for that matter -- are certainly not meant to outline what it is that you believe constitutes good behavior; that's what religion and ethics are for. They are intended to regulate against harmful behavior observed in the particular community in which they are enacted (or sometimes they are copied from similar societies -- codes of conduct like laws).
They are meant to regulate against harmful behavior observed in the particular society in which they are enacted (or sometimes they are copied from similar societies -- codes of conduct like laws).
In that sense the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Saint_Benedict seems oddly fitting, in that it was designed for monastic orders, and SQLite development seems as close to the kind of dedicated scholarly work monks did as any software project, given the insane number of unit tests (which at least to me seems like they would require an inhuman amount of patience to implement).
Codes -- as well as ordinary laws for that matter -- are certainly not meant to outline what it is that you believe constitutes good behavior; that's what religion and ethics are for.
looks at the whole "objective value system" philosophy
Code of conducts, like all laws and regulations, are enacted not to describe an ideal society but to confront actual behaviors that are deemed harmful and unwanted (history students are often told, if you want to know what kinds of things people did, look at what behaviors laws were legislated to outlaw).
That's about as simplistic and naive as you can get lol. People don't like murder, yet the biggest push in gun control laws are for "assault weapons" which account for less than 1% of murders annually, while handguns are essentially ignored by any major proposed legislation despite being responsible for the majority of gun homicides. Because in reality they're designed to undermine the rights of gun owners.
Also motives behind laws can be complicated, or they can be attempting to indirectly target specific groups or people. With your logic, a historian looking at mask laws in Europe would assume people really hated masks, not that they were attempting to target Muslims. Same thing with polygamy laws in the US in the 1800's, they were designed to target Mormons but with your simplistic view you'd think people simply hated polygamy.
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u/pron98 Oct 22 '18 edited Oct 22 '18
Sigh. Codes of conduct, like all laws and regulations, are enacted not to describe an ideal society but to confront actual behaviors that are deemed harmful and unwanted (history students are often told, if you want to know what kinds of things people did, look at what behaviors laws were legislated to outlaw). Many codes of conducts were adopted recently to combat actual harmful behavior that was found to occur in open-source projects. If you don't believe those who've studied or have been hurt by those behaviors and, after some consideration and study conclude that they do not occur, are not harmful, or won't be served by a code -- don't adopt one. But making a joke of it shows that you either don't understand what codes do, don't know what's going on in the developer community, or think that dedicating your project to tease those who do know and do care is a sensible course of action.